Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 - 1894)

Helmholtz was the eldest of four children and because of his delicate health
was confined to home for his first seven years. His father taught him the classical
languages, as well as French, English, and Italian. He also introduced him to
the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte and to the approach
to nature that flowed from their philosophical insights. This "Nature philosophy,"
in the hands of early 19th-century investigators, became a speculative science
in which it was felt that scientific conclusions could be deduced from philosophical
ideas, rather than from empirical data gathered from observations of the natural
world. (photo
courtesy)

Much of Helmholtz' later work was devoted to refuting this point of view.
His empiricism, however, was always deeply influenced by the aesthetic sensitivity
passed on to him by his father, and music and painting played a large part in
his science.

Helmholtz' work in electricity and magnetism revealed his conviction
that classical mechanics was probably the best mode of scientific reasoning.
He was one of the first German scientists to appreciate the work in electrodynamics
of the British scientists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Faraday had
appeared to strike at the foundation of Newtonian physics by his unorthodox
rejection of action at a distance, that is, action between two bodies in space
without alteration of the medium between them. Maxwell, however, by interpreting
the mathematics of Faraday's laws, showed there was no contradiction between
Newtonian physics and classical mechanics. Helmholtz further developed the mathematics
of electrodynamics. He spent his last years unsuccessfully trying to reduce
all of electrodynamics to a minimum set of mathematical principles, an attempt
in which he had to rely increasingly on the mechanical properties of the ether
thought to pervade all space.

Helmholtz was not in complete accord with Maxwell on the nature of electricity.
Unlike Maxwell, Helmholtz was interested in and had studied electrochemistry,
particularly the nature of the galvanic cell. Maxwell would have made the electric
current solely the result of the polarization of the ether, or of whatever medium
the current flowed through. Helmholtz, on the other hand, was fully conversant
with Faraday's laws of electrolysis, which related the amount of current
that passed through an electrochemical cell to the equivalent weights of the
elements deposited at the poles. In 1881, in a lecture delivered in Faraday's
honor in London, Helmholtz argued that if scientists accepted the existence
of chemical atoms, as most chemists of the time did, then Faraday's laws
necessarily implied the particulate nature of electricity. This hypothetical
particle was soon christened the electron and, ironically, the physics of its
existence helped to falsify Helmholtz' theories of electrodynamics. Though
he was unsuccessful in his goal to formulate electrodynamics, Helmholtz was
almost able to deduce all electromagnetic effects from the ether's supposed
properties. The discovery of radio waves by his pupil Heinrich Hertz in 1888
was viewed as the experimental confirmation of the theories of Faraday, Maxwell,
and Helmholtz. The special and general theories of relativity, proposed by Albert
Einstein, destroyed Helmholtz' theories by eliminating the ether. (reference)